Real estate brokers should not be allowed to act simultaneously as insurance representatives: Quebec brokers

Quebec insurance brokers have expressed concern to the province’s insurance regulator, the Autorité des marchés financiers (AMF), about a proposed amendment to regulations that would allow real estate brokers to act simultaneously as insurance representatives.
Specifically, the Regroupment des cabinets de courtage d’assurance du Québec (RCCAQ) “recommends maintaining the rule prohibiting individuals from acting simultaneously as insurance representatives and real estate brokers.”
The AMF notes that the coming into force of the Real Estate Brokerage Act in 2010 abolished the incompatibility between the activities of a real estate broker and those of an insurance representative. The draft regulation “proposes to remove the similar incompatibility in the regulation,” the AMF says.
But the RCCAQ is opposed to the proposed amendment.
“The RCCAQ has made the regulator aware of the importance of questioning the measure’s potential impact on consumers,” the broker association notes in a posting about its brief to the AMF on its Web site.
“The real question is this: to ensure better public protection, is it desirable for real estate brokers to simultaneously act as insurance representatives?
“In the view of the RCCAQ, we must take into account the example of the U.S., where the real estate sector’s assuming control over title insurance transactions has demonstrated that consumers are paying nearly three times as much for their title insurance.”
For this reason, the association says, the prohibition should remain against people from acting both as real estate brokers and insurance representatives.